Postural Communication of Emotion: Perception of Distinct Poses of Five Discrete Emotions

Abstract

Emotion can be communicated through multiple distinct modalities. However, an often-ignored channel of communication is posture. Recent research indicates that bodily posture plays an important role in the perception of emotion. However, research examining postural communication of emotion is limited by the variety of validated emotion poses and unknown cohesion of categorical and dimensional ratings. The present study addressed these limitations. Specifically, we examined individuals’ (1) categorization of emotion postures depicting 5 discrete emotions (joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust), (2) categorization of different poses depicting the same discrete emotion, and (3) ratings of valence and arousal for each emotion pose. Findings revealed that participants successfully categorized each posture as the target emotion, including disgust. Moreover, participants accurately identified multiple distinct poses within each emotion category. In addition to the categorical responses, dimensional ratings of valence and arousal revealed interesting overlap and distinctions between and within emotion categories. These findings provide the first evidence of an identifiable posture for disgust and instantiate the principle of equifinality of emotional communication through the inclusion of distinct poses within emotion categories. Additionally, the dimensional ratings corroborated the categorical data and provide further granularity for future researchers to consider in examining how distinct emotion poses are perceived.

Removing Hand Form Information Specifically Impairs Emotion Recognition for Fearful and Angry Body Stimuli

“…It is clear from these stimuli that certain emotions are associated with specific hand forms (closed fist in anger and open forward facing palm in fear). It could be argued that in these cases, this form information relates to the functional action of the hands in these emotional states (using fists as weapons in anger or flat hands as shields in fear) rather than the hands themselves conveying any explicit emotional information (Dael et al., 2012; Lopez et al., 2017). So whereas in face research, the diagnostic features may provide an observer with information regarding some inner emotional state of the expresser, in body research, emotion recognition may be achieved first through determining action or agency, and then using this to infer an inner emotional state (de Gelder, 2009; de Gelder et al., 2010).…”

“…Handedness in gestures has also been shown to be linked to communicating aggressive or passive emotional states (Kipp & Martin, 2009), while in sign language and other situations where no other communicative modality is available, the hands have been shown to be effective conduits of emotional information (Hietanen, Leppänen, & Lehtonen, 2004; Reilly, McIntire, & Seago, 1992). Different hand forms have also been associated with different emotional prototypes (Givens, 2002; Lopez, Reschke, Knothe, & Walle, 2017; Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Connor, 1987), and the recognition of hand gestures has been shown to be affected by congruent and incongruent emotional faces (Vicario & Newman, 2013). In the most explicit test to date of the importance of hand and arm information for emotional body recognition, Fridin, Barliya, Schechtman, de Gelder, and Flash (2009) showed that subjects spend more time looking at the hands and arms of angry and fearful static full-body images than they did for joyful and sad body images when distinguishing between these emotions.…”

Removing hand form information specifically impairs emotion recognition for fearful and angry body stimuli

“…It is clear from these stimuli that certain emotions are associated with specific hand forms (closed fist in anger and open forward facing palm in fear). It could be argued that in these cases, this form information relates to the functional action of the hands in these emotional states (using fists as weapons in anger, or flat hands as shields in fear), rather than the hands themselves conveying any explicit emotional information (Dael, Mortillaro et al 2012, Lopez, Reschke et al 2017). So whereas in face research, the diagnostic features may provide an observer with information regarding some inner emotional state of the expresser, in body research, emotion recognition may be achieved first through determining action or agency, and then using this to infer an inner emotional state (de Gelder 2009, de Gelder, Van den Stock et al 2010).…”

“…In body stimuli, however, not only can the features be of a different form (e.g. closed fist in anger, open palm in fear), they can also be in different positons relative to the trunk of the body (de Gelder and Van den Stock 2011, Lopez, Reschke et al 2017). These positional changes differentiate recognition between the two modalities, and this leads to the question of whether it may be the position or the form of the hands that is a more useful cue for emotion recognition.…”

Two‐person activity recognition using skeleton data

“…Another important aspect related to the interaction between two persons is the body orientation which could express a connection with the person's perceived emotions. In this context, Lopez et al [39], in a recent study, analyse the body posture assumed by 26 undergraduate students and recognise six basic emotions. Additionally, some researchers focused their efforts on what can be defined as 'group activity recognition', in which activities are performed by groups.…”